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Javier E

Trump's honeymoon with the stock market will soon be over | Nouriel Roubini | Business ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...neymoon-stock-market-dow-jones

trump honeymoon stock market business

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • It is little wonder that corporations and investors have been happy. This traditional Republican embrace of trickle-down supply-side economics will mostly favour corporations and wealthy individuals, while doing almost nothing to create jobs or raise blue-collar workers’ incomes.
  • According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, almost half of the benefits from Trump’s proposed tax cuts would go to the top 1% of income earners.
  • Trump’s honeymoon with investors might be coming to an end. There are several reasons for this.
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  • the strengthening dollar will destroy more of the jobs typically held by Trump’s blue-collar base. The president may have “saved” 1,000 jobs in Indiana by bullying and cajoling the air-conditioner manufacturer Carrier; but the US dollar’s appreciation since the election could destroy almost 400,000 manufacturing jobs over time.
  • Republicans can rarely resist the temptation to cut corporate, income and other taxes, even when they have no way to make up for the lost revenue and no desire to cut spending. If this happens again under Trump, fiscal deficits will push up interest rates and the dollar even further, and hurt the economy in the long term
  • The Nobel laureate economist Edmund S Phelps has described Trump’s direct interference in the corporate sector as reminiscent of corporatist Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Indeed, if Barack Obama had treated the corporate sector in the way that Trump has, he would have been smeared as a communist; but for some reason when Trump does it, corporate America puts its tail between its legs.
  • Fifth, Trump is questioning US alliances, cosying up to American rivals such as Russia, and antagonizing important global powers such as China. His erratic foreign policies are spooking world leaders, multinational corporations and global markets generally.
  • To be sure, expectations of stimulus, lower taxes and deregulation could still boost the economy and the market’s performance in the short term. But, as the vacillation in financial markets since Trump’s inauguration indicates, the president’s inconsistent, erratic, and destructive policies will take their toll on domestic and global economic growth in the long run.
Javier E

Op-Ed Columnist - The Genteel Nation - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...10brooks.html

growth development class economics culture values commercial productivity industry

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • sometime around 1800, economic growth took off — in Britain first, then elsewhere. How did this growth start? In his book “The Enlightened Economy,” Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University argues that the crucial change happened in people’s minds. Because of a series of cultural shifts, technicians started taking scientific knowledge and putting it to practical use.
  • Britain soon dominated the world. But then it declined. Again, the crucial change was in people’s minds. As the historian Correlli Barnett chronicled, the great-great-grandchildren of the empire builders withdrew from commerce, tried to rise above practical knowledge and had more genteel attitudes about how to live.
  • 65 percent of Americans believe their nation is now in decline, according to this week’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. And it is true
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  • The first lesson from the economic historians is that we should try to understand our situation by looking for shifts in ideas and values, not just material changes.
  • After decades of affluence, the U.S. has drifted away from the hardheaded practical mentality that built the nation’s wealth in the first place. The shift is evident at all levels of society. First, the elites. America’s brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism.
  • Then there’s the middle class. The emergence of a service economy created a large population of junior and midlevel office workers. These white-collar workers absorbed their lifestyle standards from the Huxtable family of “The Cosby Show,” not the Kramden family of “The Honeymooners.” As these information workers tried to build lifestyles that fit their station, consumption and debt levels soared. The trade deficit exploded. The economy adjusted to meet their demand — underinvesting in manufacturing and tradable goods and overinvesting in retail and housing.
  • Finally, there’s the lower class. The problem here is social breakdown. Something like a quarter to a third of American children are living with one or no parents, in chaotic neighborhoods with failing schools. A gigantic slice of America’s human capital is vastly underused, and it has been that way for a generation.
  • Most people who lived in the year 1800 were scarcely richer than people who lived in the year 100,000 B.C. Their diets were no better. They were no taller, and they did not live longer.
  • sometime around 1800, economic growth took off — in Britain first, then elsewhere. How did this growth start?
  • In his book “The Enlightened Economy,” Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University argues that the crucial change happened in people’s minds. Because of a series of cultural shifts, technicians started taking scientific knowledge and putting it to practical use.
  • the value shifts are real. Up and down society, people are moving away from commercial, productive activities and toward pleasant, enlightened but less productive ones.
  • Then there’s the middle class. The emergence of a service economy created a large population of junior and midlevel office workers. These white-collar workers absorbed their lifestyle standards from the Huxtable family of “The Cosby Show,” not the Kramden family of “The Honeymooners.” As these information workers tried to build lifestyles that fit their station, consumption and debt levels soared. The trade deficit exploded. The economy adjusted to meet their demand — underinvesting in manufacturing and tradable goods and overinvesting in retail and housing.
davisem

Republicans Begin to Break With President Trump - 0 views

time.com/...an-executive-order-republicans

shared by davisem on 30 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • davisem on 30 Jan 17
     
    A startlingly brief honeymoon for the new GOP President
Javier E

A Time for Traitors - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-time-for-traitors.html

israel Palestine mideast peace writing

shared by Javier E on 04 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Amos Oz on writing a novel: “It is like reconstructing the whole of Paris from Lego bricks. It’s about three-quarters-of-a-million small decisions. It’s not about who will live and who will die and who will go to bed with whom. Those are the easy ones. It’s about choosing adjectives and adverbs and punctuation. These are molecular decisions that you have to take and nobody will appreciate, for the same reason that nobody ever pays attention to a single note in a symphony in a concert hall, except when the note is false. So you have to work very hard in order for your readers not to note a single false note. That is the business of three-quarters-of-a-million decisions.”
  • He sees the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative as a “very reasonable starting point.” Perhaps, he suggested, “the present day is the best chance we had in 110 years to conclude the conflict altogether because Egypt, Jordan, the Saudis, the gulf states, even Assad in Syria, all have a more immediate enemy than Israel, and they are more willing to make a historical compromise with Israel.”
  • “If anyone would have proposed that in 1945 Germany and Poland immediately become a binational state they would put him in a madhouse. How can anyone in Israel or elsewhere think that Israelis and the Palestinians can simply jump into a honeymoon bed together? After generations of hatred, we need a divorce, a fair divorce.”
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  • “I’m old enough to know that when somebody says words like ‘never,’ or ‘forever,’ or ‘the rest of eternity’ in the Middle East, it usually means something like six months to 30 years. If anyone had said to me as a young man that one day I would travel to Egypt or Jordan with Egyptian and Jordanian visas stamped in my passport, I would have said, ‘Let’s not get carried away.' ”
  • “I have seen people change. They are not born again but they change, somewhat.
Javier E

Bernie Sanders' real problem isn't Elizabeth Warren. It's Donald Trump | Geoffrey Kabas... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-elizabeth-warren-donald-trump

election campaign 2020 candidates progressive

shared by Javier E on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • More than a century ago, the German sociologist Werner Sombart predicted that widespread prosperity would forestall the development of socialism in the United States. As he memorably argued: “On the shoals of roast beef and apple pie, socialist utopias founder.”
  • million Obama-Trump voters in the last election were motivated more by economic anxiety than racial resentment, and were attracted to Trump’s economic populism and opposition to free-trade agreements.
  • Sanders faces serious obstacles to obtaining the Democratic presidential nomination. The gentle treatment he received in 2016 from the media and the Hillary Clinton campaign (which ran few negative television or media ads against him) means that many Democratic voters haven’t yet learned about the distinctly non-progressive positions he has taken on certain issues throughout his senatorial career.
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  • Democratic primary voters may also wonder how effective Sanders would be as president. His pitch to his supporters is that, if he somehow were to be elected, some sort of “political revolution” would result in Congress passing multitrillion-dollar plans for a Green New Deal, a top-to-bottom transformation of the healthcare system, a federal job guarantee, free college and student debt elimination, plus other vastly ambitious and expensive plans for education, immigration, housing and so forth. These promises are unrealistic, and Sanders’ ability to get them past Congress would be approximately nil
  • in 2016 I got a glimpse of the Republican party’s opposition research book on Sanders, which was so massive it had to be transported on a cart. The Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who got to see some of its contents, declared that “it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn [Sanders] apart.”
  • According to Eichenwald, the book includes damning material such as the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to Texas where it would be dumped in a poor Hispanic community, that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union, and that he appeared at a 1985 rally in Nicaragua at which Sandinista supporters chanted “Here, there / the Yankee will die.” And then there’s Sanders’ fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men…
  • Sanders is in many ways an appealing politician whose message has resounded at a moment when both America’s economic and political systems face tremendous voter skepticism. But as a viable candidate to defeat Trump? As they say in Sanders’ Brooklyn birthplace, fuhgeddaboudit.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: Is There a Way to Acknowledge Our Progress? - 0 views

nymag.com/...-acknowledge-our-progress.html

perception threat progress human psychology bias perspective pessimism

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • picking someone who has bent the truth so often about so many things — her ancestry, her commitment to serving a full term as senator, the schools her kids went to, the job her father had (according to her brother), or the time she was “fired” for being pregnant — is an unnecessary burden.
  • The Democrat I think is most likely to lose to Trump is Elizabeth Warren.I admire her ambition and grit and aggression, but nominating a woke, preachy Harvard professor plays directly into Trump’s hands
  • Pete Buttigieg’s appeal has waned for me.
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  • over time, the combination of his perfect résumé, his actorly ability to change register as he unpacks a sentence, and his smoothness and self-love have begun to worry me. My fear is that his appeal will fade
  • Klobuchar, to my mind, is the better midwestern option. She is an engaging and successful politician. But there’s a reason she seemingly can’t get more traction. She just doesn’t command a room
  • I so want Biden to be ten years younger. I can’t help but be very fond of the man, and he does have a mix of qualities that appeal to both African-Americans and white working-class midwesterners. What I worry about is his constant stumbling in his speech, his muddling of words, those many moments when his eyes close, and his face twitches, as he tries to finish a sentence
  • Sanders has been on the far left all his life, and the oppo research the GOP throws at him could be brutal. He’s a man, after all, who sided with a Marxist-Leninist party that supported Ayatollah Khomeini during the hostage crisis in 1979. He loved the monstrous dictator Fidel Castro and took his 1988 honeymoon in the Soviet Union, no less, where he openly and publicly criticized his own country and praised many aspects of the Soviet system
  • On two key issues, immigration and identity politics, Bernie has sensibilities and instincts that could neutralize these two strong points for Trump. Sanders has always loathed the idea of open borders and the effect they have on domestic wages, and he doesn’t fit well with the entire woke industry. He still believes in class struggle, not the culture war
  • Biden has an advantage because of Obama, his appeal to the midwestern voters (if he wins back Pennsylvania, that would work wonders), and his rapport with African-Americans. But he also seems pretty out of it.
Javier E

'We will coup whoever we want!': the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-and-the-billionaire-tech-bros

tech hubris billionaire

shared by Javier E on 27 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • there’s something different about today’s tech titans, as evidenced by a rash of recent books. Reading about their apocalypse bunkers, vampiric longevity strategies, outlandish social media pronouncements, private space programmes and virtual world-building ambitions, it’s hard to remember they’re not actors in a reality series or characters from a new Avengers movie.
  • Unlike their forebears, contemporary billionaires do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest colony on the moon. In contrast, however avaricious, the titans of past gilded eras still saw themselves as human members of civil society.
  • The ChatGPT impresario Sam Altman, whose board of directors sacked him as CEO before he made a dramatic comeback this week, wants to upload his consciousness to the cloud (if the AIs he helped build and now fears will permit him).
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  • Contemporary billionaires appear to understand civics and civilians as impediments to their progress, necessary victims of the externalities of their companies’ growth, sad artefacts of the civilisation they will leave behind in their inexorable colonisation of the next dimension
  • Zuckerberg had to go all the way back to Augustus Caesar for a role model, and his admiration for the emperor borders on obsession. He models his haircut on Augustus; his wife joked that three people went on their honeymoon to Rome: Mark, Augustus and herself; he named his second daughter August; and he used to end Facebook meetings by proclaiming “Domination!”
  • as chronicled by Peter Turchin in End Times, his book on elite excess and what it portends, today there are far more centimillionaires and billionaires than there were in the gilded age, and they have collectively accumulated a much larger proportion of the world’s wealth
  • In 1983, there were 66,000 households worth at least $10m in the US. By 2019, that number had increased in terms adjusted for inflation to 693,000
  • Back in the industrial age, the rate of total elite wealth accumulation was capped by the limits of the material world. They could only build so many railroads, steel mills and oilwells at a time. Virtual commodities such as likes, views, crypto and derivatives can be replicated exponentially.
  • Digital businesses depend on mineral slavery in Africa, dump toxic waste in China, facilitate the undermining of democracy across the globe and spread destabilising disinformation for profit – all from the sociopathic remove afforded by remote administration.
  • on an individual basis today’s tech billionaires are not any wealthier than their early 20th-century counterparts. Adjusted for inflation, John Rockefeller’s fortune of $336bn and Andrew Carnegie’s $309bn exceed Musk’s $231bn, Bezos’s $165bn and Gates’s $114bn.
  • Zuckerberg told the New Yorker “through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace”, finally acknowledging “that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things”. It’s that sort of top down thinking that led Zuckerberg to not only establish an independent oversight board at Facebook, dubbed the “Supreme Court”, but to suggest that it would one day expand its scope to include companies across the industry.
  • Any new business idea, Thiel says, should be an order of magnitude better than what’s already out there. Don’t compare yourself to everyone else; instead operate one level above the competing masses
  • Today’s billionaire philanthropists, frequently espousing the philosophy of “effective altruism”, donate to their own organisations, often in the form of their own stock, and make their own decisions about how the money is spent because they are, after all, experts in everything
  • Their words and actions suggest an approach to life, technology and business that I have come to call “The Mindset” – a belief that with enough money, one can escape the harms created by earning money in that way. It’s a belief that with enough genius and technology, they can rise above the plane of mere mortals and exist on an entirely different level, or planet, altogether.
  • By combining a distorted interpretation of Nietzsche with a pretty accurate one of Ayn Rand, they end up with a belief that while “God is dead”, the übermensch of the future can use pure reason to rise above traditional religious values and remake the world “in his own interests”
  • Nietzsche’s language, particularly out of context, provides tech übermensch wannabes with justification for assuming superhuman authority. In his book Zero to One, Thiel directly quotes Nietzsche to argue for the supremacy of the individual: “madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule”.
  • In Thiel’s words: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
  • This distorted image of the übermensch as a godlike creator, pushing confidently towards his clear vision of how things should be, persists as an essential component of The Mindset
  • In response to the accusation that the US government organised a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia in order for Tesla to secure lithium there, Musk tweeted: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
  • For Thiel, this requires being what he calls a “definite optimist”. Most entrepreneurs are too process-oriented, making incremental decisions based on how the market responds. They should instead be like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, pressing on with their singular vision no matter what. The definite optimist doesn’t take feedback into account, but ploughs forward with his new design for a better world.
  • This is not capitalism, as Yanis Varoufakis explains in his new book Technofeudalism. Capitalists sought to extract value from workers by disconnecting them from the value they created, but they still made stuff. Feudalists seek an entirely passive income by “going meta” on business itself. They are rent-seekers, whose aim is to own the very platform on which other people do the work.
  • The antics of the tech feudalists make for better science fiction stories than they chart legitimate paths to sustainable futures.
Javier E

He Turned 55. Then He Started the World's Most Important Company. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...hips-entrepreneurship-506fcbc4

entrepreneur chip company Taiwan

shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • You probably use a device with a chip made by TSMC every day, but TSMC does not actually design or market those chips. That would have sounded completely absurd before the existence of TSMC. Back then, companies designed chips that they manufactured themselves. Chang’s radical idea for a great semiconductor company was one that would exclusively manufacture chips that its customers designed. By not designing or selling its own chips, TSMC never competed with its own clients. In exchange, they wouldn’t have to bother running their own fabrication plants, or fabs, the expensive and dizzyingly sophisticated facilities where circuits are carved on silicon wafers.
  • The innovative business model behind his chip foundry would transform the industry and make TSMC indispensable to the global economy. Now it’s the company that Americans rely on the most but know the least about
  • I wanted to know more about his decision to start a new company when he could have stopped working altogether. What I discovered was that his age was one of his assets. Only someone with his experience and expertise could have possibly executed his plan for TSMC. 
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  • “I could not have done it sooner,” he says. “I don’t think anybody could have done it sooner. Because I was the first one.” 
  • By the late 1960s, he was managing TI’s integrated-circuit division. Before long, he was running the entire semiconductor group. 
  • He transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering, earned his master’s degree and would have stayed for his Ph.D. if he hadn’t failed the qualifying exam. Instead, he got his first job in semiconductors and moved to Texas Instruments in 1958
  • he came along as the integrated circuit was being invented, and his timing couldn’t have been any better, as Chang belonged to the first generation of semiconductor geeks. He developed a reputation as a tenacious manager who could wring every possible improvement out of production lines, which put his career on the fast track.
  • Chang grew up dreaming of being a writer—a novelist, maybe a journalist—and he planned to major in English literature at Harvard University. But after his freshman year, he decided that what he actually wanted was a good job
  • “They talk about life-work balance,” he says. “That’s a term I didn’t even know when I was their age. Work-life balance. When I was their age, if there was no work, there was no life.” 
  • These days, TSMC is investing $40 billion to build plants in Arizona, but the project has been stymied by delays, setbacks and labor shortages, and Chang told me that some of TSMC’s young employees in the U.S. have attitudes toward work that he struggles to understand. 
  • Chang says he wouldn’t have taken the risk of moving to Taiwan if he weren’t financially secure. In fact, he didn’t take that same risk the first time he could have.
  • “The closer the industry match,” they wrote, “the greater the success rate.” 
  • By then, Chang knew that he wasn’t long for Texas Instruments. But his stock options hadn’t vested, so he turned down the invitation to Taiwan. “I was not financially secure yet,” he says. “I was never after great wealth. I was only after financial security.” For this corporate executive in the middle of the 1980s, financial security equated to $200,000 a year. “After tax, of course,” he says. 
  • Chang’s situation had changed by the time Li called again three years later. He’d exercised a few million dollars of stock options and bought tax-exempt municipal bonds that paid enough for him to be financially secure by his living standards. Once he’d achieved that goal, he was ready to pursue another one. 
  • “There was no certainty at all that Taiwan would give me the chance to build a great semiconductor company, but the possibility existed, and it was the only possibility for me,” Chang says. “That’s why I went to Taiwan.” 
  • Not long ago, a team of economists investigated whether older entrepreneurs are more successful than younger ones. By scrutinizing Census Bureau records and freshly available Internal Revenue Service data, they were able to identify 2.7 million founders in the U.S. who started companies between 2007 and 2014. Then they looked at their ages.
  • The average age of those entrepreneurs at the founding of their companies was 41.9. For the fastest-growing companies, that number was 45. The economists also determined that 50-year-old founders were almost twice as likely to achieve major success as 30-year-old founders, while the founders with the lowest chance of success were the ones in their early 20s
  • “Successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, not young,” they wrote in their 2020 paper.  
  • Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists throw money at talented young entrepreneurs in the hopes they will start the next trillion-dollar company. They have plentiful energy, insatiable ambition and the vision to peek around corners and see the future. What they don’t typically have are mortgages, family obligations and other adult responsibilities to distract them or diminish their appetite for risk. Chang himself says that younger people are more innovative when it comes to science and technical subjects. 
  • But in business, older is better. Entrepreneurs in their 40s and 50s may not have the exuberance to believe they will change the world, but they have the experience to know how they actually can. Some need years of specialized training before they can start a company. In biotechnology, for example, founders are more likely to be college professors than college dropouts. Others require the lessons and connections they accumulate over the course of their careers. 
  • one more finding from their study of U.S. companies that helps explain the success of a chip maker in Taiwan. It was that prior employment in the area of their startups—both the general sector and specific industry—predicted “a vastly higher probability” of success.
  • Chang was such a workaholic that he made sales calls on his honeymoon and had no patience for those who didn’t share his drive
  • Morris Chang had 30 years of experience in his industry when he decided to uproot his life and move to another continent. He knew more about semiconductors than just about anyone on earth—and certainly more than anyone in Taiwan. As soon as he started his job at the Industrial Technology Research Institute, Chang was summoned to K.T. Li’s office and given a second job. “He felt I should start a semiconductor company in Taiwan,”
  • “I decided right away that this could not be the kind of great company that I wanted to build at either Texas Instruments or General Instrument,”
  • TI handled every part of chip production, but what worked in Texas would not translate to Taiwan. The only way that he could build a great company in his new home was to make a new sort of company altogether, one with a business model that would exploit the country’s strengths and mitigate its many weaknesses.
  • Chang determined that Taiwan had precisely one strength in the chip supply chain. The research firm that he was now running had been experimenting with semiconductors for the previous 10 years. When he studied that decade of data, Chang was pleasantly surprised by Taiwan’s yields, the percentage of working chips on silicon wafers. They were almost twice as high in Taiwan as they were in the U.S., he said. 
  • “People were ingrained in thinking the secret sauce of a successful semiconductor company was in the wafer fab,” Campbell told me. “The transition to the fabless semiconductor model was actually pretty obvious when you thought about it. But it was so against the prevailing wisdom that many people didn’t think about it.” 
  • Taiwan’s government took a 48% stake, with the rest of the funding coming from the Dutch electronics giant Philips and Taiwan’s private sector, but Chang was the driving force behind the company. The insight to build TSMC around such an unconventional business model was born from his experience, contacts and expertise. He understood his industry deeply enough to disrupt it. 
  • “TSMC was a business-model innovation,” Chang says. “For innovations of that kind, I think people of a more advanced age are perhaps even more capable than people of a younger age.”
  • the personal philosophy that he’d developed over the course of his long career. “To be a partner to our customers,” he says. That founding principle from 1987 is the bedrock of the foundry business to this day, as TSMC says the key to its success has always been enabling the success of its customers.  
  • TSMC manufactures chips in iPhones, iPads and Mac computers for Apple, which manufactures a quarter of TSMC’s net revenue. Nvidia is often called a chip maker, which is curious, because it doesn’t make chips. TSMC does. 
  • Churning out identical copies of a single chip for an iPhone requires one TSMC fab to produce more than a quintillion transistors—that is, one million trillions—every few months. In a year, the entire semiconductor industry produces “more transistors than the combined quantity of all goods produced by all other companies, in all other industries, in all human history,” Miller writes. 
  • I asked how he thought about success when he moved to Taiwan. “The highest degree of success in 1985, according to me, was to build a great company. A lower degree of success was at least to do something that I liked to do and I wanted to do,” he says. “I happened to achieve the highest degree of success that I had in mind.” 
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